SpringFest 2001 - El Dorado Dry Lake - Day 2

The second day was much better for me! I had stayed up the
night before fixing and repainting SkyDream2.
I had purchased a motor that I had previously sim'd out as being right for the
rocket and built it carefully. The weather was absolutely great. Almost no
wind, 70 degrees and sunny. SkyDream flew great and I started the day off happy.

In addition to my flight, there were a lot of great rockets to see.
Andy and Joanne Woerner flew their 1/5 scale V2 on a full M1939.
What a great flight. Click here
or on the image below to see a 3.3 MByte MPG movie of the flight.

I sure noticed the engines on this one.
Here's the biggest rocket of the weekend. The Gates brothers had a
beautiful flight with their rocket Porthos II on an N2000 with
six, count-em, six outboard K250's.
Click here or on the picture below to
see a 2.2MByte MPG movie of the flight.

In summary, I'd sure like to thank Andy and Joanne, Kevin, Phil, and Bruce, the
"Rocket Reverend", Ryan, the guys from Rocket Silo,
the other vendors I dealt with, Dick and all the guys from the
Lucerne Test Range and Las Vegas Tripoli
for making this such a fun and rewarding weekend.

Onwards and upwards!

Click here to see a 2.7MByte MPG movie of
this Level 1 Certification flight

This time I went with a motor I had previously simulated. I estimated the
I211-M would fly the rocket to 674 meters in 11.52 seconds, ejecting about 1/2 second
after apogee.

The rocket flew pretty straight and true. In my own humble opinion, it was a nice flight!
The ALTS2 altimeter beeped out 2313', not too far off from my estimate of 2211'
(674m). The fact that the rocket actually went a little higher means that
it probably ejected even closer to apogee than the 1/2 second I'd estimated,
despite what the guy on the video says. Anyways, there was no damage to the
rocket, and Kevin and Andy were there to witness it, so now I'm a level one
rocketeer. Yeah!

Now that I had regained my manhood, I was able to click back into my agenda. I had
wanted to fly the GPS receiver to a higher altitude to see what kind of data I would
get (in preparation for building GPARS, my "Global Positioning Automatic Recovery
System"). So I loaded the GPS receiver into the new red nosecone, I slapped on a second
parachute on the rocket to account for the extra weight, put a G38 in it and
sent it up to about 1200 feet.

One cool thing about the GPS receiver is that it records a track of it's location
every second. You can click here to see a 3D graph of the flight. You can see where
I carried the rocket out to the launch pad and back to the truck. The straight
line is the ascent, and the broken line is the descent. The accuracy appears to
be pretty good. I would guess +/- 30 ft in this case. Should work well for GPARS.

You can also click here to
see a 1.9 MByte movie of this flight. The dual parachute
recovery is very pretty.

Well, now I was fully back in the swing of things. I thought I'd try to
show off SPRS. So I assembled the system, packed the parachute and checked
the electronics, put in another G38, and launched it for the crowd. The
parachute deployed perfectly, and I was able to fly it as desired.

Click here
or on the image above to see a 4.0 MByte MPG movie of the SPRS taking
off and the parachute flying under radio control! Probably the
highlight of the day for me was when, after I had landed it, a
small cluster of people gathered around and asked me questions about it.
More than with my level 1 certification, I felt accepted into the
ranks.